First, my heart goes out to my beloved city of Boston, the wounded from near and afar, and the families of victims from Dorchester, my hometown of Arlington, and Shenyeng, China. Dennis Lahane, in the New York Times, captures my pride in and my hopes for the city.

Last week, I attended and co-hosted the EdTechTeacher iPad Summit in Atlanta, which once again focused not so much on iPads as on how we might take the opportunity presented by iPads to rethink teaching and learning.

My colleague Greg Kulowiec gave a wonderful keynote address, which in part focused on an evocative analogy from Seymour Papert's Mindstorms (and recounted later in various writings). As the story goes: imagine an engineer who tries to strap a jet engine onto a stagecoach to increase its power. Of course, the jet engine's power threatens to destroy the whole enterprise, so the engineer throttles down the jet engine until it is safe to use on a stage coach. At that point, it is also pointless to use on a stage coach. Greg helpfully illustrates the idea:

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